UNREACHED PEOPLE GROUPS OR UNREACHED LANGUAGE GROUPS
STATEMENT
The terms unreached people group (UPG) and unreached language group (ULG) can focus a church’s mission strategy on those with little or no gospel access. ULG distinguishes people based on language alone, whereas UPG distinguishes people based on additional factors such as national borders and cultural and ethnic differences. ULGs are only groups with no churches or scripture available in their languages. In contrast, UPGs are broader and include groups with too few Christians to evangelize their people without outside help. While UPG and ULG offer wisdom for taking the gospel to the ends of the earth, neither are biblically mandated categories. Ministry to both UPGs and ULGs are legitimate parts of the missionary task.
Article Written by A.W. WorkmanUnreached People Groups (UPGs)
How can faithful missionaries and sending churches best define the lost among the nations? What lenses should be used when considering whether a group has been reached? Should certain groups be prioritized for missions? If so, how?
Since the late 1970s, the term Unreached People Group (UPG) has brought focus to the missionary task. Many have taken this sociological category—which is focused on ethnicity, language, and the percentage of Christians among a given people—and treated it with almost biblical reverence.
This original attempt to clarify the missionary task saw the “unreached” as a group of people with 20% or less of its population as evangelical believers. At the time, this was based on commonly accepted sociological principles. Two decades later, the number was lowered to 2% by the Joshua Project editorial committee, for reasons that remain unclear.[1]
This category helped describe the missionary's task in measurable terms. The term UPG became broadly accepted, though often misunderstood. However, problems arose.
While ethnic and language groupings are part of ancient worldviews, those in the first century were sophisticated enough to also think about political states (such as the Roman Empire, Babylonia, or Israel, for that matter). When speaking of Paul’s ministry to the lost, Acts focuses primarily on geographical and political units, cities, and provinces (Acts 13:47, Acts 16:6).
Secondly, applying the UPG definition to almost any demographic needing evangelism became easy. For example, global youth under twenty, Canadian hockey players, or American businessmen have all been called an “unreached people group.”[2]
Do those people need the gospel? Certainly. Are the evangelists who share Christ with them doing good work? Absolutely! Are they missionaries? No, not really.
But even more seriously, the watering down of the term UPG is a significant reason why most mission money (around 99%) and most missions personnel (approximately 97%) go to people groups and places where there is already a strong history of mission work, Scripture, and an indigenous church. When anything can be categorized as “unreached,” the sending and funding momentum goes toward peoples and places that are more accessible, not toward hidden and overlooked groups of the world who lack any gospel witness at all.
Unreached Language Groups (ULGs)
As a result, some missions groups are advocating for a new term: Unreached Language Groups (ULG). An unreached language group narrows the lens. ULGs are people who have no Scripture in their mother tongue and an indigenous church does not exist. Clearly, it is right for this to be a priority.
But similar challenges exist for the ULG paradigm. The South Korean people, for example, are considered reached by any measure, but they share the same language as North Korea, which few would consider “reached.”
For another example, North India has a massive population. Though the Bible has been translated into Hindi, and there are a few scattered churches, the ULG model would also see North India as “reached.”
Similarly, while the gospel may have made progress among Iraqi Arabic speakers of Christian background, deep divisions of culture and history have meant that this has not led to much gospel impact among the Muslim Iraqis who speak Arabic.
Nonetheless, the ULG model is a helpful corrective to an imbalance in modern missions.
But like any needed corrective, there’s a temptation to go too far. Churches must avoid making ULG missionary work necessarily superior to legitimate missionary work among UPGs. Examples abound of those who promote their lens as “the only way” to define and prioritize the lost.
We must be careful not to let these terms prevent churches from sending missionaries to do ministry in a trade language or to train believers in leadership development or theological education. Paul, the consummate first-century missionary, sent Timothy to continue teaching and leading the church in Ephesus. By then, this area had a significant presence of indigenous believers (Acts 19:10). Also, Paul clearly uses the trade language of Koine Greek when working in cities like Lystra, where Lycaonian was the indigenous tongue (Acts 14:8–18).
Biblical Clarity
We acknowledge that these are thorny issues. That’s why this statement is needed. Our statement acknowledges that both terms, UPG and ULG, can serve as helpful lenses for focusing a church’s mission strategy so that it serves those with little or no gospel access. Both terms can help the church send missionaries to places that have been overlooked. But we also recognize the limitations of these terms. Neither is sufficient to be the only lens. Neither term encompasses everything the Bible would rightly categorize as missions.
The Bible’s Terms for the Unreached
How, then, does the Bible speak of the lost? The Bible uses a variety of terms and categories to talk about the gospel going to the ends of the earth. In the Great Commission, Jesus says to “make disciples of all nations.” This certainly can mean ethnic groupings rather than modern nation-states (Matt 28:19). This echoes the promise given to Abraham that through his seed, all the families of the earth would be blessed (Gen 12:3). Similarly, Isaiah 25:6 tells of how God will prepare a feast on a mountain for “all peoples.”
When we consider how the Bible categorizes the lost, we see that the terms “nations”, “families of the earth”, and “peoples” are often used. This fits well with a UPG emphasis. But the Bible also includes “all languages” among the categories that God will gather to himself (Is 66:18, Dan 7:13, Rev 7:9). So, an ULG emphasis is a biblical option. It fits best with “the tip of the spear” vision of missions, whereby a missionary enters a culture not only to eventually translate the Bible but frequently to develop a a written language.
But to be faithful to Scripture, we should also consider additional categories, such as tribes and geography. Paul himself, in Romans 15:20, says his ambition is to preach in places where Christ has yet to be named. The Bible doesn’t give us a 2% threshold. Instead, Paul uses biological imagery such as a body that can build itself up in love (Eph 4:16), architectural imagery of not building on someone else’s foundation, and spatial imagery of there not being “any room for work in these regions” (Rom 15:20, 23). While a 2% evangelical measurement may be a practical benchmark, it doesn’t carry inherent authority.
Neither UPG nor ULG should be the exclusive category that a local church uses to discern what counts as “real” missions. After all, in Revelation 7:9, we see both ideas together when John describes a multitude from every “nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.”
What it Looks Like
Navigating these tensions takes both wisdom and humility, as well as a posture that seeks to make good plans while also seeking the direction of the Holy Spirit. So what does it look like when a local church understands this well?
First, this local church will have a prayerful, intentional, and balanced mission strategy.
Clarity on these terms and categories and what the Bible says about them means that the church can broadly understand which groups currently have no access to the gospel because of ethnic, religious, geographic, or linguistic barriers. The church’s leadership and missionaries will be equipped to identify these unreached groups and make steady progress in reaching them with the gospel. They will no longer have a haphazard mission strategy where mission personnel and money simply flow along with the evangelical current. However, this church’s mission strategy will balance the various aspects of the missionary task. A healthy sending church may support missionaries that serve among groups that already have a Bible in their language but are still considered UPGs because there is very little indigenous church presence. They might send missionaries to a tribal ULG tucked away among a larger group already deemed to be reached by most. They may also send and support personnel who serve in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, where the church is a mile wide and an inch deep. They may send missionaries to serve in international churches or theological education in diverse global cities.
Terms like “unreached” lose their value as their meaning gets more and more watered down. It has been said that when everything is missions, nothing is missions. This also applies to terms like unreached. A church that does not understand these principles well will unknowingly overlook valuable work and generally direct their resources overwhelmingly toward peoples and places that already have strong indigenous churches. On the other hand, if a church treats terms like UPG and ULG too rigidly, they might pass up good opportunities for ministry because they feel like they don’t count as “real” missions. Finally, on the mission field, a poor understanding of these categories can mean overly inflated or defined groups that lead to inaccurate reporting of success.
Negative examples might include a church that focuses its efforts on places like Western Europe or Central America. These places have significant needs but they also have a longstanding indigenous church. Or they might include a missionary who refuses to disciple an ethnic Christian who has come to faith because he feels it will detract from his focus on learning the language of the local Muslim UPG.
Conclusion
Ultimately, a balanced posture equips sending churches and missionaries to look keenly into the fog of lostness. By knowing that geography is not the only factor, a church is equipped to see the needs of a UPG consisting of refugees from a particular ethnic group, even if they are in a Western city with a church on every corner. By knowing that language is not the only factor, they will be able to see groups that share the same language but where one is nevertheless cut off from gospel access due to political borders, religion, or other factors. By knowing that the percentage of evangelicals is not the only factor, churches will be able to see groups with what seems like a significant presence of indigenous Christianity, yet who are ill-equipped and fragile in the faith.
Faithful missionaries and the churches that send them can wisely focus on the unreached among the nations, such as UPGs and ULGs, while also being involved in mission work that does not fit into these categories. This begins by understanding these mission terms and the different terms that the Bible uses to speak of the gospel going to the ends of the earth. Faithful and wise sending is a both/and. It will lead to currently overlooked or hidden groups receiving gospel witness, but not to the exclusion of other valid ministries that serve to both reach and disciple the nations.
footnotes
[1] See “A Course Correction in Modern Missions: Rethinking the Two-Percent Threshold” by Robin Dale Hadaway, https://swbtsv7.s3.amazonaws.com/static/swjt/SWJT57_1_7.pdf
[2] See GCC article on Missions & Missionaries: Do We All Mean the Same Thing?
